Reply backlog down to 11 pages of comments. Am doing my best to catch up...
This did cause some delay/confusion in play.
As a DM I can't count how many times I got something like - I cast command and command them to raise the gate
One word requires creativity, it also casues delay at the table, but it is worth it IMO.
Yeah, I've had issue with people giving suicidal commands, easy enough to clear up with people reading the spells description.
Just out of curiosity, where was that rule? Because it doesn't seem to be in the basic listing for the
Tumble skill (at least when I did a ctrl+f for "cobblestones")?
Got mixed up, it's flagstones not cobblestones and balance not tumble. Been a long while since I've played 3.5e. To quote the 3.5e DMG:
As with walls, dungeon floors come in many types.
Flagstone: Like masonry walls, flagstone floors are made of fitted stones. They are usually cracked and only somewhat level. Slime and mold grows in these cracks. Sometimes water runs in rivulets between the stones or sits in stagnant puddles. Flagstone is the most common dungeon floor.
Uneven Flagstone: Over time, some floors can become so uneven that a DC 10 Balance check is required to run or charge across the surface. Failure means the character can’t move in this round. Floors as treacherous as this should be the exception, not the rule.
This is a "Your Mileage May Vary" situation. Not everyone sees their job as a DM is to make up meaningless flavor for the players to explain the set-in-stone mechanics.
Exactly. I want to know CLEARLY what an ability is doing in fiction terms so I can change its effects depending on the fiction. For me, changing the fiction to better fit the mechanical effects is exactly backwards. Again, just my opinion as well, mileage my vary for different DMs.
For example, some people recommend reflavoring Eldritch Blast to make it a gun if a player wants to play a gunslinger class. I don't like that since I'd feel like a dick if someone rolled up a warlock reflavored as a gunslinger and tried shooting their gun in a pouring rainstorm and I told them their powder was too wet and it didn't work, but I WANT things like rain making a gunslinger's powder wet to be a factor in the kind of game I want to play. If the flavor is built into the game I feel fine rewarding or punishing players depending on that flavor and I really like that and enjoy making flavor matter, but if the flavor is stuff that players make up themselves I feel a lot less comfortable as a DM rewarding them or punishing them depending on how their flavor fits specific circumstances so "flavor is free" is an annoyance to me as a DM.
And yet I somehow do not see this kind of behavior in more open-ended games, so I do not believe this argument. it's not just that the players ignore session zero and you canjnot stop this kind of behavior, it's that in a more strict game some people's desire to "break it" through exploits may override respect for fellow players and poorly-designed spells like Command enable them to do exactly that. Maybe if D&D was overall more open-ended game, this would not be a problem. But not only it isn't, we're literally on forum of a website selling version of the game with 200% more specific rules. Command being so open-ended does not fit design philosophy and enables people trying to "break" the game to feel clever.
If games rules are so restrictive that they actively disallow letting players be immature dicks then they're probably going to be too restrictive for me to enjoy. Not because I'm an immature dick, but because I don't need game rules to do that sort of thing for me and any system that is that restrictive is going to disallow a lot of other good stuff as well as the immature dickery (case in point: the Command spell and how 5.5e gutted it).
I'm glad they removed the language requirement since it's hard to know whether to prepare or use Command sometimes. A few sessions ago we were fighting a chimeric sort of beast. We knew these beasts speak, but their known languages are numerous, and Common is pretty rare. At one point the DM said the beast "shouted in pain". I perked up and said, "Oh, what word did it shout?" The DM replied, "It was just a beastly sort of noise." How obnoxious! And I don't think the DM was consciously trying to make me gamble on whether or not Command would work.
Command is magic so it can just magically tell the enemy your intent. That's definitely OK by me.
I've never made up a Command word myself. The listed words are useful enough. I'm sure the jokester players in my group would enjoy making up words if they had access to the spell though.
Actually I suspect one of them has Command, he's just never looked at or changed his prepared spells.
Another case of people's milage varying. Having it MATTER if critters can speak Common or not really matter in fight makes the fiction of the world feel more real to me. For example in another campaign the DM had us attacked by a giant snake that mocked us in common and I nailed the stupid snake to the wall with Command, much to the whole party's enjoyment.
If limiting command words to a specific set of phrases (while also improving the spell by dropping the requirement that the target understands) destroys any significant amount of creativity, y'all are playing a different game than I am.
Agreed.
Every time a player uses command "creatively" the DM should be deciding what the word means to the target, and whether they even know what the word means. Use a $20 word on an ogre with 6 intelligence and in my campaign it may have no effect because I would say that ogres are as dumb as rocks but that might be insulting to rocks. In a lot of cases the best you do is cost them a turn.
Exactly.
This is such a minor, minor change that would have such minimal impact on any game I've ever witnessed.
In my last campaign I had a trickery cleric who loved pranks and, well, trickery. Her go-to spell was Command and she cast it over and OVER and
OVER, and I always tried to come up with entertaining new ways to use it which was very much in keeping with her personality (and no, no "defecate" she had more class than that). This kind of change completely removed one of her three main shticks and would make her a lot less fun to play. That would make me sad as she was a fun PC to play and nobody had a problem with her shenanigans as I'm not a dick OOC so I made sure to not use "it's what my character would do!" as an excuse to be dickish.
It's also worth noting Command lasts 1 round. Six seconds. "Surrender" means the foe gives up, for one round. "Repent" means the foe spends 6 seconds rethinking its life. "Potty humor" is at best drop their weapon and/or lose their action. (Even if you allow it, see above). It's not a one-word wish spell. It's a delay tactic at best.
Yup, and that can still be very useful. In keeping with a first level spell.
